Developing On The Rackspace Cloud

Among the many reasons why people choose the cloud, one of the most powerful is the Application Programming Interface[1], more commonly referred to as the API. As developers continue adopting virtual environments to host their sites and apps, we’re seeing increasingly innovative and powerful uses of this feature.

The API, fundamentally, allows for code to perform basic functions within your environment, such as creating, deleting or changing virtual machines. In the hands of skilled developers, the API becomes the connective tissue that allows our cloud environment to react intelligently based on your code and the code of Cloud Tools partners[2]. As variables and traffic change in your environment, your code can control you cloud configuration in a moment’s notice.

We are living in a new age of hosting. Instead of thinking of the physical hardware that your code sits on, your cloud architecture and configuration can be boiled down to lines of code. Today, you can actually save your configuration specifications and deploy them in an instant. Developers understand the importance of good, clean design; now, they can take those design principles and apply them to their architecture.

Since code can now control the environment that it runs in, it makes sense to create a self-healing environment. If something goes wrong, using a single call via the API to our platform can completely change how your configuration is working. This allows your application to automatically manage the resources to help ensure that you have enough compute power to handle your traffic.

Success in the cloud is about coding to scale. Putting your code over multiple nodes is an excellent way to make sure that there’s not a single point of failure, ensuring the performance and predictability that you are looking for. However, this takes practice. In order to code to scale and not code to fail, think about having a development sandbox made up of multiple nodes to test and develop your code. Doing so is a way to guarantee that your application, or site, is able to run over a distributed architecture, an architecture that makes the cloud incredibly powerful.

Check out Joseph’s previous post and video where he discussed how to prepare your site for a blitz of online traffic[3]. Next week, he discusses the power of the Rackspace Cloud API[4]. Find out more about the API documentation at docs.rackspace.com[5] and check out the Rackspace DevOps Blog at devops.rackspace.com[6].